Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/17

Friendship, unbroken since my boyhood, and the many occasions upon which you have encouraged or assisted such attempts as I have made to advance knowledge, alone would induce me, with affectionate regard, to dignify these Volumes by connecting them with your own distinguished name; but to whom else could I so properly inscribe them, for to your early recognition of those truths which I had enunciated as the foundations of the science of Seismology, and to your prompt and weighty advocacy, of the importance to science, of seizing the opportunity of the great Neapolitan shock to apply those principles to nature, these Volumes probably owe their existence.